Anne Carson Quotes
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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
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[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
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I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
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Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
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She doesn't get to say much in the official biography - I believe they are out of wine, etc., practical things - watching with one eye as he goes about the world calling himself The Son Of Man.
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while the shadows like long fingers over the haystacks that sweep past keep shocking him because he is riding backwards.
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It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
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We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
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The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
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You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
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Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.
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I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.
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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
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At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving; this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.
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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
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Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.